Future of Scientific Computing Panel

In this session of the 2005 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, leaders of three supercomputer centers discuss their vision of where scientific computing is going in the next 5 to 10 years and how computer science technologies can help change scientific research.

Speaker Details

David Lifka is the Director of High Performance Systems and Innovative computing for Computing and Information Sciences at Cornell University. His duties include management of the technical staff providing systems administration, consulting and systems research and development for CIS, Computer Science and the Cornell Theory Center. Lifka is an expert in Windows based high performance computing and led CTC’s technical move from proprietary UNIX to Windows-based industry standard high performance computing, working with strategic partners, including Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Unisys, Giganet, and ADIC. His areas of expertise include parallel job scheduling and resource management systems, UNIX-to-Windows migration, and HPC services. Lifka’s vision is that HPC must become pervasive and as easy to use out- of-the-box as a personal computer to make it a viable tool for more than those at academic institutions and research laboratories. Lifka is actively involved in eScience and Data Intensive Computing efforts at Cornell. Understanding the manageability and maintainability of petabyte size data repositories as well as the use of SQL Server and Web services for developing seamless HPC interfaces are of primary interest to Lifka. Lifka came to Cornell University from Argonne National Laboratory in 1995. Lifka has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and serves on a number of corporate and IT advisory boards.

Date:
Speakers:
David Lifka, Fran Berman, Jay Boisseau, and Marvin Theimer
Affiliation:
Cornell Theory Center; University of California, San Diego; University of Texas, Austin; Microsoft